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I commented on this in a recent thread and was crucified for being a self centered sociopath... better luck to you.

• noelwelsh 10y ago
  Heh. I think think the sociopathic conclusion would be to claw one's way to the top no matter what. The compassionate conclusion would be to reduce inequality, so all benefit.
  • yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Unless you can reduce inequality to zero - Harrison Bergeron style [1] - you can't fix this by reducing inequality. It's an ironclad law of mathematics that 20% of the population will be part of the bottom fifth. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
    • noelwelsh 10y ago
      I believe the level of inequality, and the level of social mobility (which is probably related to the magnitude of inequality), is more important than the existence of inequality.
      • cheald 10y ago
        Are you aware of any academic literature on the subject?
        • noelwelsh 10y ago
          It's not my area, but putting some keywords in Google Scholar yielded some results pretty quickly. E.g. this paper http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504850701720197 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504850701720197 "We investigate the relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility. Proxying fathers' earnings with using detailed occupational data, we find that sons who grew up in countries that were more unequal in the 1970s were less likely to have experienced social mobility by the late-1990s."